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- Forming political identities is pre-requisite to the kritik – only learning to navigate political engagement solves Bertsch, 95
Policy Focus GoodEven if they’re right, our framework’s better – learning to speak in the language of traditional policymaking is key to creating policy change Campbell, 02 – John L., Department of Sociology, Dartmouth College (“Ideas, Politics, and Public Policy,” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, JSTOR)RK As noted above, one of the most important problems with the literature on ideas and policy making is that the causal mechanisms whereby different types of ideas affect policy making are often poorly specified (Yee 1996). However, scholars have made some progress. Actors and Epistemic Communities One way to explain how ideas affect policy making is to show through careful process tracing how specific actors carried certain ideas into the policy-making fray and used them effectively. These actors are often academics and other intellectuals whose claim to knowledge and expertise enables their voice to be heard above others (Brint 1994a). For example, Skowronek (1982) argued that an intellectual vanguard of university-trained professionals, economists, and other progressive thinkers were among America's most valuable state-building resources during the early twentieth century. They played key roles in the development of a more professional, bureaucratic U.S. state by providing all sorts of new ideas about how to better organize the state and exercise state power. Intellectuals were also important in advancing various programmatic ideas about how to build welfare states in Europe and North America (Rueschemeyer & Skocpol 1996). Similarly, think tanks, research institutes, and university academics-notably economists have affected industrial and macroeconomic policy making (Domhoff 1998:ch. 4; Ricci 1993; Stone 1996; Smith 1991, 1989). At the international level "epistemic communities" are responsible for generating new ideas and disseminating them among national policy makers as well as others in the international community. Epistemic communities are networks of professionals and experts with an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge, who share a set of normative beliefs, causal models, notions of empirical validity, and a common policy enterprise (Haas 1992). Keck & Sikkink (1998) argued that these networks are especially important because their members are often responsible for generating the very ideas that constitute the world culture, discussed earlier, to which sociologists attribute isomorphic effects at the national level. Moreover, Keck & Sikkink specified more carefully than most world culture researchers how these transnational networks mobilize and frame information, and how they convince powerful international actors, such as the World Bank and U.S. government, to press nation states that are reluctant to adopt internationally accepted human rights, environmental, and other policies (see also Risse et al. 1999). As such, their contribution is threefold. First, they delineated several causal mechanisms through which world culture affects national policy makers, thereby injecting a degree of agency into the otherwise structuralist world culture literature. Second, they addressed the important debate over whether a few centralized hegemonic organizations (e.g., McNamara1 998, Pauly 1997) or decentralized networks of organizations and individuals, each of which is rather weak on its own (e.g., Boli & Thomas 1999), are responsible for the diffusion of world culture. For Keck & Sikkink, both matter. Third, they showed that the diffusion of world culture often involves much struggle, conflict, and even repression. Indeed, diffusion is a much more uneven and contested process than much of the literature suggests (see also Mittelman 2000). Institutional Filters and Embeddedness Of course, actors do not operate in a vacuum. Many researchers have argued that the formal rules and procedures governing policy making affect which ideas penetrate the policy-making process and are adopted and implemented as policy. In other words, institutions influence the degree to which academics, other intellectuals, and thus new policy ideas can access policy-making arenas. This sort of institutional filtering has affected economic policy (P. Hall 1989a,b), welfare policy (Weir & Skocpol 1985), energy policy (Campbell 1988, Jasper 1990), and national security policy (Risse-Kappan 1994). Studies have paid less attention to the informal channels through which this occurs, but insofar as intellectuals and policy makers travel in the same social circles, social as well as political institutions can act as filters in this sense (Domhoff 1974, Rueschemeyer & Skocpol 1996). For instance, one reason why national unemployment insurance was passed in Britain was that liberal social scientists from Oxford University, who favored such a program, mingled in the same clubs, associations, and other social venues as London's political elite and urged them to adopt this idea. As a result, when the Liberal Party came to power in the early twentieth century, many of these intellectuals were appointed to key administrative posts where they helped formulate the program, which was passed in 1911 (Schwebber 1996). Indeed, the ways in which idea-producing institutions, such as the professions and universities, are linked to the state helps determine which ideas affect policy making (Ziegler 1997). Forming political identities is pre-requisite to the kritik – only learning to navigate political engagement solves Bertsch, 95 – Charlie, graduate student in the English Ph.D. program at UC-Berkeley (“Useful Fictions,” Bad Subjects, is. 19, March 1995, http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/19/bertsch.html)RK The third model of identity in circulation today — usually called constructivism — provides us with a way to avoid such dilemmas. Inspired by psychoanalytic and Marxist traditions, proponents of this model argue that nothing is necessarily constant to an individual's make-up. They try to show that what seems most integral to an individual's being is actually put-together in a social realm that both precedes and exceeds her or his bodily boundaries. Another way of putting this is to say that this model of identity insists on the social-constructedness of all subjects. In a sense, this is not so much a model of identity in its own right as a countermodel whose purpose is to refute other models of identity. Obviously, if we agree that an individual's will is constructed by social forces, then it becomes impossible to say that individuals are in complete control of their actions. Likewise, if we agree that qualities like race, gender, and sexual-preference are imposed on an individual by those forces, then it becomes impossible to state that a given individual is essentially anything. More generally, if we agree with this model, we are forced to acknowledge that the notion that individuals possess identity-in-the-singular is itself a construct. That is, we must acquiesce to the superficially radical idea that all identity is a fiction. We get a very different picture of transformational identities when we consider them in the light of this model. It suggests that transformational identities are not a special case, but the norm: if there can be no fixed identities, then what we have been calling 'transformations' are the only identities we have, plain and simple. Although this model suggests that all identities are fictional, its more extreme proponents — usually called 'post-structuralists' — reserve special animosity for the idea that the different identities an individual performs can somehow add up to a coherent 'self,' an identity-in-the-singular. They imply that the more time an identity must span and the greater the number of individual actions it must therefore encompass, the more dangerous it becomes. In a way, this is to argue that the problem is not which identities are made or how they are made, but that they sustain themselves at all. Unfortunately, if we draw this sort of conclusion from the constructivist model of identity, it is nearly impossible to imagine substantive political action. Almost all political action requires concerted effort towards a definite goal over time. And such effort, in turn, requires a reasonably stable identity. After all, it is impossible for individuals to strategize unless they know that they will have the same general goals tomorrow that they have today. In radically critiquing the idea of identity-in-the-singular, the post-structuralists who draw this conclusion ultimately promote passivity. Hegemony, Ideology, and Identity Of course, it is one thing to realize that all identity is a fiction, but quite another to decide what to do with that insight. We can draw other conclusions to from the constructivist model of identity, ones which can enable political action rather than inhibit it. In order to get a better sense of what they might look like, we need to take a detour through theory more directly concerned with the workings of society as a whole. When Marxist social theorist Antonio Gramsci looked at the Western world of the 1930s, he saw that vast numbers of people appeared strangely content to live within a power structure that runs counter to their own best interests. In trying to account for this phenomenon, Gramsci realized that the ruling class in modern societies does not rule by threat of force alone. He theorized that the majority of people in such societies behave themselves, not only because they fear punishment, but also because they consent to the power structure that maintains the status quo. Indeed, since most people do not break the law or seek to overthrow this power structure, it can be said that their consent plays a bigger role in perpetuating the dominance of the ruling class than does their fear of punishment. Gramsci called the achievement and maintenance of this consent 'hegemony.' Two aspects of Gramsci's theory of hegemony are particularly significant for our thinking about identity. The first is that he describes hegemony as a kind of cultural 'glue' able to bind and hold together very different sectors of modern societies, even ones which have little or nothing in common. As Stuart Hall phrases it in an article entitled 'Gramsci and Us,' hegemony 'does not reflect, it constructs a 'unity' out of difference.' The second aspect relates to the way hegemony manages to accomplish this. Because it resolves real differences into a semblance of unity, hegemony requires the creation and sustenance of an illusion. To put this another way, hegemony depends upon a collective fantasy in which conflicting sectors are perceived to be somehow alike, a fantasy that these sectors share a common identity. Hegemony is, in other words, a fiction of collective identity. But how does this relate to the issues surrounding individual identity that we have been discussing? Gramsci doesn't talk about individuals much, except to discuss the ways in which they bond together in organizations. As I will explain later, I think it might be good to start thinking about individuals in terms of collective identity. For now, however, we can turn to another Marxist social theorist who tried to build on both Gramsci's insights into collective identity and Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic insights about individual identity. In the essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation' from which Bad Subjects derives its name, Louis Althusser revises the traditional Marxist definition of ideology. Instead of contrasting the illusions of ideology to the 'truth' of reality as Marx had implicitly done, Althusser argues that there is no escape from ideology. 'Ideology,' he writes, 'represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.' Because our minds always 'mediate' (or filter) our relation to reality, it is not possible for us to have direct access to it. Instead, we only have indirect access to reality through the socially constructed fictions with which we define ourselves and our place in the world. To rephrase this insight in terms of our topic, because identity takes shape when we distinguish between what and where we are, and because it is socially constructed, it derives from our imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence. We could say that, if ideology represents, then identity is a principal effect of that representation. If all identity is a fiction, then it must be ideology that creates and sustains that fiction. As we can see, Althusser clearly argues for a constructivist model of identity. Where he differs from the post-structuralist proponents of this model whom we discussed earlier, however, is in his distinction between ideology-in-general and ideologies in the plural. 'Ideology-in-general' refers to the inescapable fact that we can never access reality directly: we always perceive it through what Lacan called the 'imaginary,' through fictions. Ideologies, on the other hand, are the historically specific fictions with which people of a given place and time make sense of themselves and their relation to the world. Making this distinction allows us to conclude that, while we cannot escape ideology-in-general, there is a lot at stake in determining which specific ideologies dominate our lives. This returns us to Gramsci's notion of hegemony. Since hegemony really depends on the creation and sustenance of a collective fiction of identity, it is really just a specific ideology that holds sway over the majority of people in a society. As Althusser's argument suggests, hegemony is therefore not eternal, but something that can be challenged by other specific ideologies. From a leftist perspective, challenging hegemony requires the creation of an alternative fiction of collective identity. That is, if we wish to disassemble a particular power structure, it is not enough to say that it is bad. And it certainly isn't enough to show that it is glued together by a fiction that resolves real differences into a semblance of unity. Rather, we need to provide a different logic with which to make society cohere, one in keeping with our political goals. Clearly, the idea that all identity is a fiction need not induce passivity. If, as Althusser argues, there is no political action, no 'practice except by and in an ideology,' then we must construct fictions of identity adequate to our political project. Those adherents to the constructivist model of identity who are so suspicious of identities that can be sustained over time seem to forget that, as Karl Marx puts it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 'men make their own history,' though 'not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.' They forget, in other words, that the social forces that construct identity result from the collective activity of human beings. Indeed, from Bad Subjects' leftist perspective, the strength of this model comes from its recognition that identities are made, not found. That its proponents would forget that the social forces that construct identity are themselves made, not found, seems remarkable. Useful Fictions As we mentioned earlier, we live in a society that, for all of its modernity, still reserves a prominent place for fantasies of transformation. The majority of these fantasies, however, narrate metamorphoses in which individuals change more or less independently of the society around them. When we do get narratives in which individual transformation is more closely linked to collective transformation, such as in science-fiction tales of the 1950s or Star Trek: The Next Generation's stories about the Borg, they tend to be extremely pessimistic. While becoming a vampire or murderer can give a character personality and even glamour, becoming a standardized cog in an impersonal machine cannot. What all this suggests is that, although we need to imagine transformation, we are encouraged to imagine it only as individual transformation. This is a phenomenon leftists would do well to consider. Certainly, there are times when it is useful to imagine individual transformations. As several articles in Bad Subjects have attested, autobiographical 'conversion' narratives can be a powerful way of communicating with people who might ignore an explicitly political message. In the long run, however, our goal is not just to 'reach' people, but to organize them into a new and better society. The left needs to turn the idea of transformation on its head. We do not need narratives of individual transformation within a society that does not change. Instead, we need to construct fictions of identity that inspire individuals to work for social change; fictions of identity that are predicated not on the individual's opposition to society, but on her or his integration into it; fictions of identity in which individuals act, not as autonomous individuals, but as part of a collective movement; fictions, finally, that are worth believing in. 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